The voice of Education within the Intercultural Ethical-Political project

Anna Maria PassaseoUniversity of Messina

In order to understand the “intercultural question” today, it necessary read it into the wide design which sees the commitment, from more than twenty years and in different ways, of western democracies in facing the migratory phenomena.

The contemporary migratory phenomena put in question the policies and the organizational forms of democratic nation states

what Abdelmalek Sayad defined as “thought of State”, i.e. the whole of the categories through which a State defines as “natural” the national borders that separate citizens from “others”.

To Sayad, immigration “disturbs”

It disturbs when induces to ask if it is really “natural” make the confrontation among cultures a matter of power.

It disturbs when it leads to ask if the western cultural model can tolerate societies which are based on different organizational principles.

It disturbs when, in recognizing and defending democracy, it arises the risk that democracy can fail, since it has to be founded on universally shared rules, that cultural relativity put in question.

It is evident that:

the “intercultural questions” involves first of all the political sphere, as need to re-negotiate the democratic living agreement through a participated process of re-definition of shared values

But, on Political level

We saw the opening of a debate around critical questions not solved yet:

How to satisfy the multiple demands of citizenship?

How to understand needs of communitarian rights and individual rights?

How to organize a new “social contract” to reach a new “overlapping consensus”?

Linked to the Political question is the Ethical one

On what principles is it possible to base the living together? Still there are open questions:

Is it right to impose an ethic? Is it right to think of an universal ethic? If we all agree that we have to pursue the

“good”, how can we define what is “good” and what is “evil”?

Is ethic a deduction of principles or something that is “lived”?

According to Raimundo Panikkar

The only form of ethic which can have strength today is an intercultural ethic, meaning by this a procedure through which arriving to orientations of value by dialogue.

But, are we able to do it?

This question leads to the Educational level

because of the presence of foreign students in the schools;

because of the awareness that a pacific living among groups and communities could not be a spontaneous consequence of the natural human attitude to sociality.

Education has been the first to welcome the challenge of multicultural societies, for two main reasons:

So

Intercultural education was born as a project of control and intervention on a reality that could be led within paths determined by reason and human ideals, coming from that humanity that hardly fought to affirm precise values explicitly fixed: freedom, equality, dignity, justice, solidarity, to mention some of them, as a defence of liberal democratic societies.

A project

aimed especially at fighting all those psychological blocks that obstacle the relation with “others”:

fear of loosing one’s own identity; defensive closures; prejudices and stereotypes.

However today we cannot say that the intercultural question has lost its project dimension becoming a stable aspect of society.

On the contrary, everyday we register phenomena of new racism and intolerance towards diversities at all levels, restrictions of rights to immigrants and incapacity in managing autonomously simple intercultural conflicts.

That’s because

In Italy what we could realize was the so-called “adaptive agreement”: an agreement that, especially in the context of work and citizenship, proposes a logic of adaptation.

The immigrant has the right to preserve his own culture of belonging if, at the same time, adopts the culture of the host country.

In this scenery

Education offers more space to negotiation, to the possibility of relation between different cultures that share the same goal of reaching an agreement through the participation of all subjects.

But

Any process of negotiation between different cultures requires specific capacities and attitudes, of openmindness and dialogue, that still are not present in our western societies.

So it is right on this capacities that education is called to intervene, especially in this new historical phase, characterized by the presence of the so-called “second generations”.

Education is called to cultivate those capacities which can prepare subjects to create the space of the meeting, a space in which it is not necessary to abandon one’s own “cultural luggage”, and where it is possible to cooperate with others in order to analyze and solve common problems, in conditions of equality.

Living in democratic, pluralistic and multicultural societies means helping the gradual inclusion of new subjects and groups in the socio-cultural-political scene.

Once they are recognized in the dominant cultural, these groups could bring new perspectives and new proposals of social organization only if they will be able to coordinate each other on the basis of practical needs and problems.

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